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Friday, October 7, 2016

Having sort of a bad morning as I write this post (3 October), so I feel like I should just let this one speak for itself rather than try to offer commentary. Nothing against the orchid itself, which is fine.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Another pretty bad seedling. Waiting to see how the second bloom turns out, but the first was kind of a mess:

Small, thrips-scarred, burnt margins, and the spathe flips back early too.

Stretching to find something positive: it's hard to tell what color the spadix was aiming for, but it's conceivable that the color combination would have been interesting. Doubtful, sure. But not entirely unimaginable. And there's at least a lot of suckering? I guess?

Though the internodal distance is big, which kind of cancels out the suckering. As mentioned in one of the footnotes in the post for 0698 Landon Cider, it's possible that I should have known this would be the case for the seedlings from 0108 Deena Sequins. About the best I can come up with for Delta is that the thrips damage on the leaves is minimal.

I'm going to give her a chance to put up a second bloom, if only to see what color the spadix is trying to be. One is already in progress, so that shouldn't take too long. And then I'll probably throw her in the garbage anyway.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The news is a few days old now, but I should report that the fall bloom cycle has already begun for my Schlumbergeras. The 2015-16 batch ran later than ever before (Schlumbergera 200A Breakin' The Law bloomed in June), and now we have a record early start to the 2016-17 season.1

I have mixed feelings about this, as the Schlumbergeras need a lot of documenting once they all start to bloom: not only do I need photos of the flowers, but then there's the naming and the blogging and spreadsheets and so forth. It's fun, but it gets to be a lot. This year may be even busier than the last two, since I've rearranged the plant room and brought even more plants up from the basement. It's theoretically possible that we might see as many as 68 new, never-seen-before blooms. More excitingly, there's a very good chance that this will be the year we start to see some new colors.2

Not today, though. Today we have Donovan. Who is not great.

The main issue here is the ragged spathe margins, but on top of that, we have the thrips damage on the spadix (at least I think that's what that tan patch in the middle is), an unusually dramatic flip of the spadix a couple days later,

and the bloom is small to begin with. I can only come up with one potentially-good thing about it, which is that the veining is unusually dark, compared to the rest of the spathe. The contrast is even stronger in person than in the photos. That's not automatically a good thing, but it's different, which makes it interesting.

Anyway. The leaves are only so-so.

And there aren't many of them, though that's sort of a good thing. The reason there aren't many leaves is that Donovan flowered before getting moved to a 4-inch pot. Early flowering has become a less valuable trait to me as more seedlings have bloomed; now I'm much more interested in how many flowers the plant produces, whether the plants are thrips-resistant, the size of the spathes, and whether the blooms are interesting colors. But blooming early doesn't hurt anything.

The plan at this point is to wait until there's a second bloom to compare to before making a decision on Donovan. Not optimistic about it being better, but I can still wait and see.

Donovan is the offspring of 0239 Russ Teanale, who's been a mixed bag as a parent so far.

Russ is great, and Herbie shares his dad's tendencies toward large spathes and lots of blooms, even if Herbie's color is ordinary. Sister Kitty and Donovan, on the other hand, were awfully disappointing.

There won't be any new seedlings from 0239 Russ Teanale for a while; though the BR seedling group was large (23 seedlings), 12 of them were discarded due to scale infestation, and another 8 were stunted, weak, or dry. There are some Russ seedlings in the germination containers, but for the moment, I don't have room to pot them up. So it'll probably be another year, year and a half, before we get to see any of his other offspring.

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1 The first plant to bloom this year was 025A "Clownfish." One of the more notable things about "Clownfish" all along has been its willingness to set buds in conditions when other Schlumbergeras wouldn't, so this isn't as surprising as it would have been for one of the other seedlings. But still.
The first "Clownfish" bloom opened on September 26 or 27 this year; ordinarily I see the first blooms in late October.2 Specifically: of the previously-unbloomed plants, 3 are seedlings of x buckleyi, 16 are seedlings from the NOID white, and 17 are seedlings of the NOID magenta. So I'm expecting to see at least one pink/pink or pink/white this year.
This might also be the year of the first second-generation bloom; 5 of the relocated seedlings have 025A "Clownfish" as the seed parent. No idea what the pollen parent might be on those, so I'm trying to my expectations low by assuming they're going to be more orange/white and orange/pink flowers.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

I love the idea that "Chandelier" is a suitable drag queen name. I mean, of course it is, obviously it is, but I would never have thought of it.1 I don't know much about the queen herself; I found one video on YouTube, but the audio quality is really bad. She looks good, though.

Anyway. Chandy's one of the better recent seedlings, though unfortunately not in a way that carries over well to photos.

I'm not sure what the problem is, or how even to describe what's missing from the photos. The photos always wind up making it look like the saturation's just been turned up too high, somehow; in person it all but glows.

And that's a terrible description. But it's as close as I can get to an explanation. For purposes of the post, I've tried to tone it down enough for the spadix color to be clear, because I think that's a lot of the magic here -- it's not just the color of the spadix, but how close it is to the spathe without quite matching.

Anyway. Very excited about Chandelier, even if I can't show you exactly why. She also happens to be pretty resistant to thrips: though there are spots on both the spathe and spadix, they're hard to see, and the leaves are decent.

For the record, I don't know what's going on with that leaf's left side for sure. Looks like it maybe got creased before it unfurled, or something like that. I don't think it's a bug problem.

So anyway. Definitely a keeper, not even a question.

This might be a good moment to note that I've also figured out a way to claim a quarter-shelf for 6-inch Anthuriums. After agonizing over who would get promoted into bigger pots for a while, I settled on 0105 Deanne T. Christ and 0694 Brad Romance.2 I hope to be able to shift plants around a little more in the next few weeks, but it's difficult, since things got cold enough here last week that all the outside plants had to come in.3 If I can make more room, 0723 Tara Dactyl and 0716 Herbie Hind get the next two spots.

Oh, one other thing -- Chandelier Divine Brown is the last of the seedlings from 0005 Chad Michaels to bloom, so here they are all together, for comparison purposes:

I liked Chad, but I kinda think they might all improve on him, in one way or another.

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1 My made-up drag queen names tend to be entirely pun-based. I dare say they're (occasionally) clever and fun, even. I've tried coming up with a list of names like Chandelier, where they're plausible as drag names even though they're not used as given names, but it turns out that even when you find a word that works, it's really hard to come up with a surname for it.
Not that they all need surnames; in the course of writing this, I decided that "Baguette" was probably fine as a mononym. But one can only pull the mononym trick so many times.2 Deanne because the purple ones are rare, and take priority automatically whenever they appear; Brad because he's both very pretty and very huge: if I didn't up-pot Brad soon, I was worried that he was going to outgrow his spot. Unlike some of the other really huge plants, Brad doesn't have unusually big leaves, at least not yet, but he takes up a lot of room, because his peduncles and petioles are unusually long. I kind of hope the leaves do get huge sooner or later, both because it would make the plant seem more in proportion to itself, and because the seedlings with huge leaves (0408 Tex Messich, 0334 Jean Poole, 0360 Heidi Gosique, 0314 Camille Yen, 0083 Carmen Adairya, 0330 Faye Quinette) often wind up being my favorites.3Almost all. I'm still trying to decide whether two of them get to live through the winter or not. A little frustrated with them for not just dying already and taking the decision out of my hands.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Another Paphiopedilum fairrieanum cross.1 None of the crosses look much like any of the others, so fairrieanum isn't contributing a distinctive appearance, but there wouldn't be so many hybrids involving it if it weren't being useful somehow.

It's also another orchid from Lehua Orchids.2 They're pretty excited about it, but I'm not a huge fan personally, mostly because of the color. The photos at Lehua show flowers that are green/pink/white, which is a more appealing combination.3

Even if I'm not crazy about its color, I'm impressed with the size and apparent health of the plant in the show.

1 "Another" referring to this post from August, also a Paph. fairrieanum cross, with links to other previously-blogged crosses.2 (Previously: Pretty picture: Masdevallia Bella Donna 'Lehua Snow Blush')3 Possible explanations for the color discrepancy: inaccurate color replication on one or both cameras, different clones of the same grex, photo-editing software, misidentification, differences in lighting.

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